Sunday, 31 May 2015

This is the blackhouse village where we stayed on the Hebridean island of Lewis ...

That's us. Last cottage on the right, nearest the beach.

And here's our blackhouse. The tiny window in the roof was my bedroom.

And this is Peigi, who lived there until 1974 when she moved to the council houses up the road. Born in 1895, she left to work in munitions in Glasgow during WW1, then stayed on after the war in the herring curing but returned to the island in the 1930s to look after her parents.

I didn't do much reading. Wild, blustery Hebridean weather doesn't allow for lounging in deckchairs. But I did manage to read Entry Island, by Peter May who wrote the Lewis Trilogy. Entry Island is nowhere near as riveting and I wasn't terribly interested in the present-day murder on a remote Canadian island. But the flashbacks to the 19th century, the potato blight - which affected Scotland, as well as Ireland - and the brutal Highland Clearances were fascinating to read in a landscape where there's so many derelict crofters' cottages. As for The Blackhouse, the first book of the Lewis trilogy ... now I simply have to read it again.